Are you real? Who are you when you are in the presence of others? Maybe you’re hiding your truth, your joy, pain or love. But what is real love in any case? How can you be in a relationship with others and stay true to yourself?

These are the questions that Wendyne Limber asks in her course, ‘Intimacy without responsibility’. Wendyne says that practicing the art of freedom in a relationship has to do with having intimacy without responsibility for others. She says that only when we truly heal and take care of our own issues, can we love more deeply.

According to Wendyne every relationship you have is mirroring something about you that wants to come up into consciousness for healing and transformation.

“Whenever I have a problem or issue with you, I have an opportunity to heal and transform something inside me . . . This does not mean that I will not help you or support you. I will figure out how to do that in the healthiest way that serves us both. As I learn to take care of me, I am actually more free to love you fully,” Wendyne says.

Teri Uktena says that some people seem to get caught repeatedly in the sticky web of others’ needs. It’s as if they cannot free themselves to create the life they actually want to live.

According to Teri there are many people who have difficulty speaking their truth. There are those who know who they truly are and yet can’t seem to express this in their daily lives.

“It’s as if they have an inner life which is divorced from the shell they put on each time they open their eyes.”

Others struggle to be seen or heard – as if they are invisible or behind a sheet of glass. What people react to isn’t them and yet it’s being experienced as them.

Madisyn Taylor says that although most of us express our distinctiveness in many ways throughout our lives, we take great pains to downplay those eccentricities we ourselves deem odd.

We edit ourselves because we are involuntarily attuned to the attitudes of the people we encounter every day. In the process we have learned to suppress what these people will disapprove of.

Do you remember when you were between the ages of one and four years old? If you don’t, think of someone close to you now at that age. Paul R Scheele says that you have to imagine being just as fearless, expressive, emotionally flexible and free.

Then try to find out what caused you to crush these characteristics in yourself. What negative messages did you hear? And which personality traits did you then develop as a reaction to the negative feedback?

We are all labelled at some stage of our lives and it is truly amazing that we don’t realise how we unconsciously react to these labels. Just listen to this study done by psychological scientists Emily Zitek of Cornell University and Lynne C Vincent of Vanderbilt University.

They divided 99 college students into two groups. The entitlement group was asked to write down three reasons why they should demand the best, deserve more than others and get their way in life. The other group was asked to write down three reasons why they don’t deserve more than others.

Afterwards both groups were asked to complete two tasks to measure creativity. Students in the entitlement group scored significantly higher creativity scores than the other group.

“Our results suggest that people who feel more entitled value being different from others, and the greater their need for uniqueness, the more they break convention, think divergently and give creative responses,” Emily and Lynne say.

So, girlfriend, is it only when you feel you have the right to express yourself that you can do so creatively? Of course you are going to come across people who disapprove of your particular brand of creativity. Of course a part of you will cringe. But life as we know it is way too short not to show who you are; not to be real.

You simply have to learn how to shake your tail feathers as if no one is watching. Shake it, girlfriend. Do the twist; do the fly. Oh! Do the swim; the boogaloo.